


If even a single person remembers you

by sunsetseas77



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Anger, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Long-Term Relationship(s), Revenge, Stabbing, Support, it's already occurred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-29 03:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17800220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsetseas77/pseuds/sunsetseas77
Summary: Kal is looking for him, but she knows her brother best. She's found him, while letting others search thousands of miles away. The hitch in her plan was that Alex knows her.





	If even a single person remembers you

Kal is looking for him, but she knows her brother best. Better than Lillian. Or his one-time closest friend. And she’s found him, while letting others search thousands of miles away. The hitch in her plan was that Alex knows her.

The warehouse Lena tracked Lex to following a trail of illicit substances that, when combined properly, were hideously destructive in their exothermic reaction and lingering vapors, burns in the background, a victim of their confrontation. The flames and the grotesque shadows thrown by them provide the perfect setting. She’s in hell and she’s dragged her wife’s killer in to join her.

Lex’s suit provides protection where it still covers him, but its power is exhausted. His arms are pinned down by chunks of blown-out concrete Lena dropped onto them. She has his torso and legs pinned by the suit she developed and rigorously updated, working to protect others from Lex and the toys he's constructed. 

She’s proved superior in this confrontation, not just suit to suit but pilot to pilot given she’s suffered contusions, scratches, and a probable ruptured eardrum while Lex has multiple broken bones, deeper lacerations, and an eye damaged by chemical vapors. And a knife is pressed shallowly into his belly where Lena tore away his suit’s shielding.

“You took her!” she’d screamed, finally allowing the raw agony to escape when the knife first contacted skin, staring down on her brother’s half-smirk, half-grimace that leaked blood from a split lip. She felt him trying to squirm away, to find leverage for a final time. He wasn’t successful. “You took her away from me! From all of us!”

Lex knew Lena wasn’t looking for an explanation, and she wasn’t interested in bargaining either. No longer moving, he just stared up, the smirk dominating. “You knew that was always the goal,” he gritted out, his expression verging on satisfied.

This should have been over by now, even with the drawn-out ending she had planned for her brother, but the knife’s progress is currently halted. Alex, who had fooled Lena into thinking she bought the subterfuge, pleads from behind them where she stands in black body armor with her sidearm in hand. 

Lena hasn’t taken her eyes off Lex since the two of them hit the ground, blinking her only respite. Her harsh threat issued at the initial sound of Alex’s voice keeps her sister-in-law at a distance, but she’s still talking.

Lena taps into every ripple and wave of pain and fury flowing through her to push that voice and the sentiments it carries away.

Alex has already worked through her appeals to Lena’s inherent goodness. They’ve drawn no response, other than to stop the knife. Lena’s close to correcting that delay. 

Higher caliber emotional ammunition hurtles at her.

“Don’t do this, Lena. Don’t. Please. Think of Linze. Your little girl needs you. The mother she loves, the person you are.”

She knew Alex would reach for the big guns, and Lena is prepared given she’d pounded herself with them early on in this tragedy. 

“No. I failed her,” Lena yells back, never turning. “I failed them both. Kara, the mother she deserves, is dead because of me, because of my family. I won’t allow those threats to remain. She’ll be safe after this, and she won’t have to see a reminder of what killed her mother.”

Her need to punish herself, which Alex almost certainly suspects, is all-encompassing. That and the anger. 

Alex tries again, tenacious as always in an argument. “Kara wouldn’t want this. This isn’t you.”

“It is,” she counters. “I choose to still carry the name; that part of me still exists.”

Lex strikes straight into the opening he sees with that declaration, into the intersection of her identity and her rage.

“Exactly,” Lex says to her, tone low and words hurried between harsh breaths, intent on negating Alex’s appeals. “And you recognize you attached yourself, grew close. But you’re released now to follow it. Finish this and move on to what will overcome all the decisions that got you to this place, to what will make you great. What will let you leave them.”

“Lena,” Alex is yelling over Lex as he finishes, “you were a different type of Luthor from the beginning. And you’ve been a Luthor-Danvers for a very long time.”

At this assertion, a supportive, sure voice whispers through her mind, an echo from over a decade ago, “Now you have someone who will stand up for you always.” It fades, but not before it’s reacted with Alex’s earnest words on bonds built to intensify their pull.

“You carry what the two of you created and grew together,” Alex continues. “Your daughter. And the ability to always hope, to use that to overcome obstacles. Please don’t abandon all of it.”

Lena struggles as Alex tries to sway her. A piece of her argues to give in, but really, given her role in what happened, given what she lost and how she rose in response to that loss, are the words that Alex said true anymore?

The knife stays at the same depth. Her eyes remain on Lex who looks back with eyes half-lidded, resembling more than anything a surly, curious viper not quite able to attack and wondering how to both exploit and fix that. 

How were they here, she wonders. Lena'd known how this was supposed to end, cleanly and with no openings for regret about her actions along the way.

As if the world is conspiring against any attempts that she might make to regain control of the situation, to progress along her carefully crafted path of frontier justice and revenge, boots touch down behind them and take a step.

The weight is wrong; it’s not Kal. God, no, her ears are playing tricks on her.

“She’s returned, Lena, to witness your continued failure,” Lex whispers, tuned in to her in that way of his that he had once used to comfort before he used it to manipulate. “You failed to protect her. You failed to be like them. Look at what you’re doing right now. Stop trying.”

Even knowing Lex’s words are purely meant to damage, she can’t prevent the vise-like tightening in her chest and an intense ringing in her head. The wince closes her eyes for longer than a second. 

The concrete falls away. Lex brings one arm up and toward her with the latent energy left in the micro-generator that he had diverted and saved for such a loss of concentration. His powered fist is a blur as it homes in on Lena’s head.

Ten inches past breaking free a red boot crushes his arm back to the ground.

Lena registered the lack of a second primary color on the suit beside her the instant she opened her eyes and her own body moved to counter Lex’s attack, an ultimately unneeded action. A wandering thought also registered how proficient Alex was at shifting a scenario’s odds in her favor, in this case drafting Superwoman into the mix. What Lena didn’t register in that split second was the way her movement pressed on the knife, and Lex shrieks as it slides further into his torso.

“Lena, please stop,” Sam implores, foot on Lex’s arm. She makes no move to touch Lena with anything other than her words. “This isn’t where you want to go.” 

The memory of blue eyes, shining with barely contained excitement, hits hard. “She’s so beautiful, Lena! And she’s ours!” Astonishment and delight shape every syllable as Kara is visibly trying to not grasp Lena’s arm that holds the sleeping newborn so she won't jostle both of them with her joy. “The years ahead, they’re going to be amazing!”

Blinking rapidly, Lena’s gaze falls to the knife, and the tiny Kryptonian symbols along the inside of the left wrist plate that she’d etched there as a replica of her wedding bracelet catch her attention. She can feel the emotional turmoil breaking free to map itself across the muscles of her face.

Lex must see it as he scoffs through teeth clenched in pain, “Why listen to her? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t understand what follows you.”

Lena agrees with him. Alex and Sam know parts, but neither understands the whole. Kara, though…she can hear Kara in her ear, so many times during their years together, whispering words of encouragement and belief in her. Kara had known Lena Luthor completely, and she had loved her. She had pulled Lena close and offered Lena the ethos she lived by. Not because Lena had to adopt it. But for Lena to use on her own terms, if she wanted to. And she was free to offer back to Kara what she could. 

The two of them were integral to each other, the genesis of their connection pre-dating the joining of their names by years. The intensity of the pain and guilt had buried it, but that truth is roaring back to Lena. 

Its reappearance reinforces Alex’s words, that Lena can extend Kara’s presence and act in her memory. She can accept what Alex and Sam, two who recognized what was happening in this act, offer, the option to not pursue punishment or dark exile but to stay and embrace that she has them, she has Linze, and she absolutely has Kara in her heart.

“Sam?” Lena says as the tumult in her head lessens and balance starts to return. She continues looking at Lex, her face calmer now, letting him know he didn’t win this. 

“I got you, on three,” Sam answers gently. “One. Two. Three.”

Lena slips the knife out and backs up. Sam uses her speed to fill the space the instant she exits it.

Lex gasps as Sam pulls him to his feet, quickly destroying the power supply to insure no further surprises before slapping a compression pack on the bleeding wound and securing him. “You’re going back to Stryker’s,” she informs him.

Regaining his breath, Lex starts, “Not a bad day…” but Alex is beside Lena to shield her at the same time Sam eschews any other precautions and shoots into the air with him.

Alex relaxes before tensing again when voices come through Lena’s suit, the auditory sensors tuning into the conversation in the sky as Sam is saying, “She was my friend and my mentor.”

“No,” Lena waves Alex back, “Let me.”

“Then why not let me fall?” Lex’s voice comes through. “You could get away with it. You’re thinking about it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sam answers. “You didn’t know with Superman. You don’t know with Lena. You won’t drive her to be what you want her to be, what you’ll tempt death to make her. And you won’t break her. She’s strong in her principles, in her family. She lives from and for those things. Unlike you.”

Lena shuts off the receiver and drops to the ground to sit, exhaustion and sadness at a depth she’s never felt before flowing in as she starts to release the rage and need for vengeance that had kept them at bay. Her head hangs down and tears wet her cheeks as she stares for miles, possibly all the way to the core of the Earth. She feels Alex wrap arms as best she can around Lena’s suit to hold her.

“He used threats to me to get her there,” Lena whispers to Alex through the first sob, breaking under the comforting gesture from the woman who’d lost her sister.

“I know,” Alex whispers back, her voice thick. “And she went to keep you safe, to keep the family you brought her safe. She loved you. She still does. We all do.”

Lena can feel Kara present between them, there for both of them in their sorrow. Kara’s been with her from even before that first declaration of, “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.” It won’t be easy, it will take what may feel like eons, but with that reassurance, she knows they can get through this.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote over half of this months ago and it was sad. Trying to work through a block on a multichapter that I keep rewriting parts of rather than adding to, and decided to try to work this one out to take a break. It got more hopeful. From a piece I saw offering alternative redemption arcs and suggested 'giving up your great revenge'. Doesn't entirely fit but here it is with some melodrama.


End file.
